Catalytic converters: what changed the EPP’s stance on green policies?

There has been speculation about the socialists and liberals pulling out of European Parliament’s ‘grand coalition’, an informal centrist alliance with the clout to translate its policy preferences into formal Parliament positions.

The root of this speculation is the centre-right European People’s Party (EPP) continued backtracking on sustainability policy, most recently the Green Claims Directive.

Ostensibly they did this to revive Europe’s flat-lining ‘competitiveness’, which moved to the top of the agenda with Mario Draghi’s report on the topic in September 2024. But the EPP drift from the centre showed up in the data long before Draghi published his report.

This graph plots the distribution of votes on sustainability-related plenary amendments in the July 2019 to May 2024 Parliament. If an MEP is on the right of the axis, they voted for every ‘pro-sustainability’ amendment. On the left means they voted against or abstained on all of them.

While some aligned with their centrist grand coalition partners, the average EPP MEP was much closer to right-wing groups (ECR, ID).

The inflection point arrived in 2023. Below we can see what percentage of EPP MEPs voted ‘pro-sustainability’ in the February, July and September 2023 plenary sessions. There was a massive drop from February to July, which never really picked back up.

This was not a Parliament-wide trend. Green MEPs voted for all ‘pro-sustainability’ amendments put in front of them. The socialists weren’t far behind. Even the liberals, who dropped from 95% to 72% between February and July, picked back up to 86% by September.

All politics is national, regional, local, state, municipal…

It is interesting to look at what percentage of the ‘pro-sustainability’ votes in February had swung to ‘anti-sustainability’ by September in each national delegation within the EPP.

It’s not perfect (1), but this does capture the scale of the shift in just nine months. Something – beyond just the admittedly controversial files on the docket – must have triggered this.

Perhaps it has something to do with the different degrees of swing. If we take those Member States where it is most pronounced (say the 90 – 100% bracket) no common structural attributes seem to unite all these Member States and exclude all the others (but if you can see some, I’d love to hear). From a geographic, economic, historical, demographic etc. perspective, it’s a mixed bag.

One compelling catalyst I can think of for a change at that precise moment, between February and July 2023, was the unexpected rise of the BoerBurgerBeweging (BBB).

The BBB was a Dutch political party that didn’t exist before November 2019 but ousted the EPP-affiliated VVD as the largest group in the May 2023 senate elections. Its platform was mainly opposition to environmental regulation, especially recent measures the government imposed to meet targets set by the 1992 EU Habitats Directive.

Presumably EPP parties elsewhere saw what happened in the Netherlands, worried the same wipeout could happen in their upcoming elections, and decided to take preventative measures by dropping the green cause. (2)

Looking at 2023 elections, this tracks. Broadly speaking, those countries with lower swing rates tended not to have elections (be they presidential, state, regional, municipal etc.) in the months of 2023 following the BBB’s success.

I suspect some of the delegations with a higher swing rate also faced more pressure from well-organised, parties to their right enjoying higher levels of support (FdI, FPÖ, AfD, RN, VOX) – making them more exposed than those in the second column. (3) (4)

Ultimately, the message from May 2023 to centre-right parties – especially those with upcoming elections and strong competition from their right – was clear: green policies will punish you at the ballot box. The EPP’s shift on sustainability may have been as much (or more) a strategic pivot as it was an ideological one.

A Complex Adaptive System

This all underlines just how much of a Complex Adaptive System the EU is:

Nonlinearity: Small changes to one part of the system can lead to larger (often unpredictable) changes elsewhere. In this case, a Directive adopted 33 years ago has just taken today’s entire EU policymaking process to the brink. (It’s also a good reason to be wary of anyone in this town advising you with a high degree of confidence that “doing A will lead to B”).

Feedback loops: We are seeing appear to be increasingly tighter feedback loops between fringe movements adopting a political cause, centrists pivoting to try and secure or win back votes, the issue’s political salience increasing, and fringe views being normalised and legitimised. This playbook was employed to shift the Overton Window on identity and civil liberties/human rights discourse. But on environmental policy, it seems to have accelerated much more quickly.

Path dependence: In the same way that ecologies are shaped by early species, or that technologies are shaped by early iterations, some developments in complex system tend to get locked-in over time. One of the successes of these feedback loops is it becomes very difficult for the EPP to politically extract itself. How can the EPP row back on its commitment to rein in the Green Deal without risking further electoral losses?

Flipping the narrative

If progressives … centrists … whatever we want to call them … want to win back the EPP, they would have to provide them with some political room to manoeuvre. Eventually, this would have to become a long-term, structural solution (I’ve argued before that they can do this by borrowing a leaf out of fringe party playbooks).

But their immediate priority would probably be to stem the bleeding. Maybe in the short-term, too, the hotfix for centrists would be to use the complexity engrained in the system and the fringe’s own playbook against them.

The BBB 2023 campaign was fundamentally a populist one. There must be a way for the grand coalition to triangulate (or at least communicate) its position to secure its goals in such a way that resonates with the broader public mood – providing the cover for the vulnerable EPP to buy in.

The Green Claims Directive, perhaps, shouldn’t have been communicated as a part of the push for a circular economy. Perhaps it was about protecting hard-earned taxpayer’s cash from false advertising by Big Business? Perhaps it wasn’t about imposing additional red tape and edicts from Brussels, but holding faceless corporations accountable for greenwashing and exploiting the trust of citizens?

This would also have given the centre the benefit of ‘owning’ issues traditionally seen as the realm of the right: law, order and justice. Flipping the narrative would have put the fringes in the position of having to pick between supporting the centrists (cozying up to the elites) or voting against measures which make them look soft on justice. Interfering in the right’s feedback loops (as they did with the centre’s) by communicating on territory traditionally seen as their own may be the best short-term fix the centre has.

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(1)     Some of these delegations comprise only one or two MEPs, and others have low-to-zero percentage change because they voted ‘anti’ through 2023

(2)     It is more likely to be a response to an exogenous shock than to something systemic in these country’s agricultural profiles. Those countries with a 90 - 100% swing rate all have different structural and economic agri sectors, and if it were about the share of electorate in rural areas, one would expect to see Poland and Ireland in the list.

(3)     Czechia had comprehensively elected a moderate President, right-wing parties in Estonia had lost votes in recent elections, the EPP had won comofrtably in Greece, and there was no real right-wing opposition in Ireland.

(4)     I’m not implying the BBB is right-wing (nor that it’s not), but rather that the EPP sees its main threat as coming from the right. It’s quite difficult to place the BBB on the political spectrum. They ran a populist, anti-establishment campaign, but now sit in the EPP, underlining just what a ticking time bomb the sustainability issue may be for the group, and raising the question of a potential future green/brown EPP split.